First year of Spanish Dream Property
- Where Your Dream Matters
To say the first year was a steep learning curve is probably an understatement. We needed to find the right places to advertise and promote our service and we made a couple of expensive mistakes even applying the lessons learned about targeted advertising from our other business.
Our web site was, and still is, designed and hosted by an English guy living in Spain. This was cheaper than having someone in the UK design it but it also meant he had a better understanding of what it needed to achieve as he already had several estate agents as clients and understood the need for being able to use feeds from other sites that were in different formats and could talk in ‘tech language’ to Spanish as well as English designers of those sites. Maybe it’s an age thing, but computers are as alien to me as Martians! I went to a school that was considered privileged for having one computer – it resided in a special computer room and took up almost the entire room!
However by the end of that first year we had happy clients, which was our objective. The recession was biting hard, house prices in Spain were still falling, Spanish mortgages were by then almost impossible to obtain and austerity was the new watch word, so we figured happy clients was pretty good going!
On a sad personal note, having beaten cancer previously, my now 78 year old Dad was diagnosed with leukaemia in October 2010. During his treatment complications of facial skin cancer developed, a terrible battle that he could never win. I cannot fault the care he received over the next three years from the Spanish health service and Denia hospital. He was always treated with respect and dignity.
Healthcare in Spain is something all those planning to relocate need to consider. The equivalent of the NHS in Spain is good, ranking well in the EU tables, but it is not freely available to all who move there. Rules change, and have changed since we first made our plans to relocate, and that has forced us to change our plans accordingly. Check-out the situation for your personal needs before making the move.
Our web site was, and still is, designed and hosted by an English guy living in Spain. This was cheaper than having someone in the UK design it but it also meant he had a better understanding of what it needed to achieve as he already had several estate agents as clients and understood the need for being able to use feeds from other sites that were in different formats and could talk in ‘tech language’ to Spanish as well as English designers of those sites. Maybe it’s an age thing, but computers are as alien to me as Martians! I went to a school that was considered privileged for having one computer – it resided in a special computer room and took up almost the entire room!
However by the end of that first year we had happy clients, which was our objective. The recession was biting hard, house prices in Spain were still falling, Spanish mortgages were by then almost impossible to obtain and austerity was the new watch word, so we figured happy clients was pretty good going!
On a sad personal note, having beaten cancer previously, my now 78 year old Dad was diagnosed with leukaemia in October 2010. During his treatment complications of facial skin cancer developed, a terrible battle that he could never win. I cannot fault the care he received over the next three years from the Spanish health service and Denia hospital. He was always treated with respect and dignity.
Healthcare in Spain is something all those planning to relocate need to consider. The equivalent of the NHS in Spain is good, ranking well in the EU tables, but it is not freely available to all who move there. Rules change, and have changed since we first made our plans to relocate, and that has forced us to change our plans accordingly. Check-out the situation for your personal needs before making the move.
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